By Mathijs Mulder-Barge

Judy McAllister has been part of the Findhorn community for 48 years, which makes her one of the people here who remembers the place when the Universal Hall was a building site and seven people were cheerfully sharing a single caravan. She arrived from Canada in the late 1970s, and has devoted much of her life since to helping people connect to themselves, each other and the subtle realms. She also spent twenty years working alongside Dorothy Maclean, one of the co-founders of our community. I had the pleasure of sitting down with her to talk about what first drew her to Findhorn, and, more importantly, what has kept her here, and why she believes this work matters today.

*Dorothy Maclean and Judy McAllister have worked together for two decades*

It Very Nearly Didn't Happen

It very nearly didn't happen. Judy first stumbled upon Findhorn in a book she grabbed to read at Halifax airport, and her reaction was - to put it kindly, cautious. "I was quite straight-laced," she says. "There were other ways I could explain people seeing fairies." A two week visit ensued nevertheless. Her husband, having looked at the busy, eclectic community, decided it was far too much. Too big and too busy.

Then, on Christmas Eve, the two of them sat in her husband’s family home in Switzerland and meditated along with the community gathered in Findhorn over midnight. He came out of the silence, turned to her, and said: “You're right, this is the next step, we're going back.”

She had known it all along. Walking through the door at Findhorn’s Cluny Hill campus for the very first time, she had felt it in her whole body. "A visceral, full body experience of, I am home."

*Cluny Hill, a former Victorian Hotel near Findhorn, where part of the Findorn Foundation members used to live*

Learning to Listen in Trees

What she did not yet realise was that she had been preparing for this her whole life. Long before Judy had any words for it, she knew how to be still. As a young woman on a Canadian homestead, whenever the day became too much, she would climb into the branches of an old oak tree and sit there until she felt calm enough to carry on. It was years before she understood what she had been doing. "I had learned how to meditate, sitting in that tree," she says. "That's where I had learned how to go still and to listen. But I didn't know that's what it was."

*"I had learned how to meditate, sitting in that tree.”*

That, in the end, is what so much of this work comes down to. It is not necessarily very technical. It means slowing down and remembering how to listen. To the living world around us. To one another. To the place inside that knows the way before we do.

It is an important capacity, and an increasingly rare one. Everything now is so instant, Judy observes, and our attention spans have narrowed to match. The inner life asks something different of us. "It's a subtle set of muscles," she says, "and if you don't use them they atrophy." The hopeful part is that they can be rebuilt, given a little time and the right company.

Belonging in Two Directions

So I asked her the obvious question: after 48 years, and by her own admission plenty of difficult chapters along the way, what keeps her here? She didn't start with Findhorn at all, but with something she thinks is true of everyone. "I believe that inside all of us is an innate longing to belong," she says. "To understand what it is we belong to, or where our place is. That eternal question, why am I here?"

What she found here was an answer to that question, though not quite the one she expected. The belonging works in two directions at once. "Yes, I am part of everything else," she says, "but who I belong to is me. It's both and." That is an important reassurance, because so many of us suspect that to belong to something larger we have to give ourselves away. Judy's experience has been the opposite.

The more deeply she connected inwardly, especially with subtle realms, the more clearly she came to know who she was. Over the years it has settled into something she calls coherence, a sense that she and the world around her are no longer pulling in different directions. "I've touched that place inside where I know I belong, that I am part of something magnificent and so awesome. Why would I turn my back on that experience?"

That is what many of our programmes are about…

Two Invitations This Summer

In July, The Findhorn Garden offers a week of slowing down in the company of the living world.

Much of what happens is gentler and more ordinary than the phrase "co-creating with nature’s intelligence" might suggest. There is the simple regulation that comes from working with your hands in the soil. "There is a calming effect in getting my hands in the dirt," Judy says, "a tranquillity." There is the steadying experience of belonging to something larger than your own worries for a while, and there is what the garden quietly reflects back to you about your own patterns and rhythms.

The garden, as Judy describes it, becomes a kind of teacher. Yes, there is joy in it too. She recalls being so moved by the aliveness of a place that she "laughed till she cried." But you do not need to arrive expecting anything like that. Mostly it is a week to come back to ground, to nature, and to yourself. Through connecting with nature and its different intelligences, it becomes more clear who we are.

🌱 Join the Findhorn Garden

In August, Following Your Calling turns the same attentiveness inward, toward the shape your own life is trying to take.

There is a long tradition here of treating life itself as the classroom, and the conditions of our lives, even the difficult ones, as teachers. "All the teachers I need are right in front of me," Judy says with a smile. "Some of them I'd rather weren't, but they are."

In practice, the week gives you things to work with. You learn to notice the directions already moving in your life, and to recognise your own inner signals, the particular feelings and cues that tell you when something is genuinely right for you.

The week also includes the Transformation Game, a playful and surprisingly precise way of reflecting on where you are, what might be getting in the way of where/who you want to be as well as offering prompts and reminders of the resources you already have that support you to get where you want to go.

For Judy, learning to listen, to see life in this way became a way home to herself. "Instead of constantly being in the past, or trying to plan the future, I am much more able to be here. This is today. This is now. This is me."

💛 Join Following Your Calling

The Whole Planet Is the Mystery School

You do not need any experience to come, and you do not need to believe anything in particular. What matters, Judy would say, is simply a willingness to stay curious, and to keep saying yes to engaging with whatever is placed in front of you. As she put it, in a line I keep coming back to, the days of the sheltered, elite mystery school are over: "The whole planet is the mystery school now. We're all in it, folks."

We are all in it already. These weeks simply offer the time, the company, and the space to slow down and attune to your inner and outer world.

The Findhorn Garden runs 4 to 11 July. Following Your Calling runs 8 to 15 August. Both take place at the Park Ecovillage, Findhorn.

Come join us!

The Findhorn Garden | 4 -11 July

🌱 Join The Findhorn Garden

Following Your Calling | 8 - 15 August